Censorship and self-censorship

Concerns about the overreach of Washington's electronic surveillance have been bubbling away in the US since late last year, when it was revealed that the government was secretly wiretapping thousands of US citizens.

American writer HL Mencken earned himself a place in the reporter's hall of fame with his comment that

the proper relationship between a journalist and a politician should be akin to that between a dog and a lamp-post.

But the lamp-post has a nasty habit of pissing back, as it did yesterday when President Bush savaged the US media for its "disgraceful" disclosure of a CIA programme that monitors millions of international banking transactions to track down the sources of terrorist funding.

Bush argued that the report harmed Washington's war on terrorism by giving the game away about what it was trying to do in secret:

We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.

This emotive rhetoric has played well among conservative writers, but where the media has solid information about something, it should be up to them to decide whether security needs really do outweigh the public's right to know. If the government wants to persuade an editor not to publish, it should be able to provide convincing evidence of why publication would be harmful.

The right-to-know issue was clearly significant here. There was enough disquiet about the surveillance programme in Washington for nearly 20 officials, many of them apparently quite senior, to speak to the New York Times for the article that broke the story.

And concerns about the overreach of Washington's electronic surveillance have been bubbling away in the US since late last year, when it was revealed that the government was secretly wiretapping thousands of US citizens and monitoring huge volumes of internet traffic.

As for whether the article disrupted intelligence-gathering operations, the New York Times' executive editor Bill Keller offers a robust defence of his decision:

The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don't know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it.